The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Flip-flops or latches are widely used in various integrated circuits (IC), such as sequential logic circuits, synchronous circuits, and the like. In an example, a processor for processing packet data on a computer network is implemented using a pipeline architecture having a plurality of sequential processing stages. Flip-flops are used throughout and between the pipeline stages to sample signals and to perform various logic operations. The flip-flops are clocked to synchronize various logic operations, for example. The activities of the flip-flops consume a relatively large portion of power consumed by the processor circuitry.